Colombia’s death squads get respectable

The United Nations and other organisations have condemned a new Colombian law that will grant former members of death squads near-immunity and allow their leaders to retain their loot and drug profits. Is this demobilisation or legitimisation?

by Carlos M Gutiérrez

THE justice and peace law passed by Colombia’s parliament on 21 June allowed the president, Alvaro Uribe, to claim he had made peace with, and demobilised, the extreme-right paramilitaries. There was widespread and varied reaction from multilateral bodies, politicians, human rights campaigners and the press. An editorial “Colombia’s capitulation”, on July 4 in the New York Times suggested: “It should be called the impunity for mass murderers, terrorists and major cocaine traffickers law.”

The Colombian congress knows how the paramilitaries came into existence, what they have done and who has been, and continues to be, behind them. It has given them political status without the approval of the international community or the prior national consensus that the law’s promoters had sought. As the director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights office in Colombia, Michael Frühling, remarked a week before the law was passed, “it is not a good idea to treat paramilitarism as a mere political misdemeanour” (1).

The government may deny parentage, but the extreme-right groups are happy to admit that they are the children of the state. “We were born paramilitaries,” says one of their most prominent leaders, Ernesto Báez. “The weapons sent to us in June 1983 at Juan Bosco Laverde, San Vicente de Chucurí and Puerto Boyaca and in the Magdalena Medio region, had government stamps on them.”

Shortly before the law came into force, several Democratic members of the United States Senate wrote to Uribe to express their anxiety about “the very negative impact that this law could have on peace, justice and the rule of law in Colombia” (2). Earlier, a group of their Republican opposite numbers had declared their support for efforts to achieve peace in Colombia, provided that “such a process is conducted pursuant to an effective legal framework that will bring about the dismantling of the underlying structure, illegal sources of financing and economic power” of terrorist organisations. “It is also critical,” they added, “that the provision of benefits to [paramilitary] leaders be conditioned on the groups’ compliance with the ceasefire and cessation of criminal activity” (3). Uribe promised to take their demands into account and then ignored them.

This is all about cocaine, and such narco-traffickers as Pablo Escobar, Gonzalo Rodrí-guez Gacha, Carlos Lehder and the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers. These were the idols and role models of many Colombians in the 1980s, accepted in political circles and secretly visited by national leaders. In towns such as Medellín and Cali, where their word was law, local authorities kept out of their way, teamed up with them or turned a blind eye.

The drug barons could be useful allies. Their supplies enabled the CIA to finance the Contras’ vicious war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. They acquired enormous power and enough wealth to pay off Colombia’s foreign debts, an offer they actually made in 1983 in an attempt to legalise their business and escape extradition to the US.

When the activities of guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Popular Liberation Army (EPL) and M-19 dramatically lowered land prices, the traffickers were quick to take advantage. They bought or grabbed vast tracts of land in rich livestock regions including Magdalena Medio, Ariari, Urab and Cordoba. The tax (la vacuna) levied by guerrillas provoked the first clashes with major landowners and narcos. When the guerrillas tried to kidnap some of narco associates, the traffickers responded by setting up a squad, Death to Kidnappers (Muerte a Secuestradores, MAS), based in Medellín and Cali, with the help and participation of active members of the army and police, who saw a chance to broaden private support for their struggle against the rebels (4).

MAS spawned many imitators. Members of the armed forces indoctrinated, led and armed them. Israeli, South African and British mercenaries came to Colombia to train them. The dirty war that followed was directed not just against the guerrillas, but also towards the elimination of political, trade union and popular leaders in areas open to supposed subversion.

The increasing power of the narcos and their integration into national public life began to alarm sections of the establishment in both Colombia and the US. The dominance of Pablo Escobar and the Medellín cartel became intolerable. Those traffickers whom the US authorities sought to extradite operated in the open, murdering ministers, magistrates, prosecutors, officials and lawyers (5). Finally the Cali cartel, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, Brigade XX (answerable to the Colombian army’s intelligence service) and a government team formed an alliance. The Pepes (“People persecuted by Pablo Escobar”) tracked down and eventually killed him.

But his death did nothing to lessen the power of the paramilitaries. With the continuing support of the CIA, the scattered, independent factions reinvented themselves as state-supported counter-insurgency groups. Thousands of civilians died as the “genocide” of an emerging political party, the Patriotic Union, was followed by massacres in the areas of La Chinita, Pueblo Bello, Trujillo, Mapiripán and La Mejor Esquina.

In 1997 seven “self-defence” groups - the largest being the Córdoba and Urabá Farmers’ Self-Defence Group - came together under Carlos Castaño’s leadership to form the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). After almost 20 years of internal struggle, the paramilitary movement had finally managed to assert its control over the many scattered armed groups that promoted the local interests of individual traffickers. A concerted campaign of psychological warfare had been accepted by a section of society.

The AUC brought together traffickers who presented themselves and their gangs as decent farmers who had taken up arms in defence of their own rights.

Two telling statistics indicate the political and economic power of these groups. They claim to control 35% of congress and, according to Colombia’s government accounting office, the contraloría general, they control at least a million hectares of land (6). As a result there are 3.5 million displaced people wandering the streets of Colombia’s main towns. Even official figures concede that between 1988 and 2003 paramilitary forces killed 14,476 people, including many community leaders (7).

Despite the lack of any legal framework, since congress approved the law some 4,000 paramilitaries have already laid down their weapons. But, as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has pointed out, the law has not brought truth, since it does nothing to reveal the official agents behind paramilitary violence. Nor has it done anything to dismantle the structures and economic muscle that could, at any moment, reactivate the demobilised fighters and their surrendered weapons (8).

Once the law comes into force, 20 judges will have just 60 days to examine the crimes committed by 10,000 paramilitaries who are expected to make a derisory “free confession” before returning to civilian life by the end of the year. Any prison sentences will be limited to a maximum of eight years, to run from the beginning of negotiations (the Santa Fe de Ralito agreement of July 2003). Condemned paramilitary members will serve their terms in agricultural settlements, or may be allowed to pay a fine and leave the country.

The paramilitaries announced the end of their activities and declared a ceasefire as long ago as November 2002. But the government has had to admit that there have been many violations (9). In September 2004 Colombia’s public defender announced that during the first eight months of that year he had received 342 complaints about apparent ceasefire violations (10). Estimates by NGOs are even higher: the Colombian Commission of Jurists has insisted that between December 2002 and August 2004 1,899 people died or disappeared because of paramilitary activity.

Since it not only ducks the issue of drug trafficking but also risks legitimising the huge fortunes that it has generated, Uribe’s legislation may turn out to be no more than a vast money-laundering operation. It is well known that paramilitaries continue to seize land from communities in the basin of the Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó rivers in Choco province, where they have teamed up with political, business and financial interests to introduce vast projects, including the cultivation of African palms (11).

It is also well known that in regions such as Caquetá, Putumayo, Meta, Guaviare and Vichada, where military operations are being conducted against the Farc under the Patriot Plan, the paramilitaries march in behind the army to exact compulsory levies from merchants and farmers, control daily life, appropriate houses in the towns and subject women to sexual slavery.

The arrival of fighters in urban areas leads not to peace, but oppression. Recently, when the police and army attempted to arrest a paramilitary trafficker, his forces responded by blockading Medellín’s buses. Calm was only restored when he was “imprisoned” in one of his villas.

Inhabitants of the outlying areas of Barrancabermeja, Bucaramanga, Barranquilla, Cartagena and even Bogotá, live in constant fear of the paramilitaries. The gangs are able to participate “legally” in activities since business and other sectors of the legitimate economy are happy to work with them. Uribe’s recent proposal that former paramilitaries should be employed to patrol roads is evidence that the armed forces are recruiting demobilised fighters.

The former president Andrés Pastrana is among those who have suggested that the main consequence of the new law has been for the paramilitaries to move into the towns to prepare the ground for the May 2006 election in which Uribe, or one of his allies, hopes to be returned to power.

(4) In November 1981 a group of guerrillas kidnapped Martha Nieves Ochoa, the sister of Melellín cartel leaders Jorge Luis and Fabio Ochoa, and demanded a $12m ransom. This was the fifth kidnapping related to cocaine trafficking in a month. MAS seized and secretly interrogated more than 700 leftwing sympathisers or activists.

(5) Their first act was the assassination of the justice minister, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, on 30 April 1984.